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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

This morning Greg McCaffery CEO of Bloomberg Law sent a letter to clients announcing some changes at Bloomberg Law and BloombergBNA. The most immediate impact will be the unification of all legal products under a single subsidiary named BloombergBNA starting in January 2014.

New Leadership Structure Effective January 1, McCaffery will become the CEO of Bloomberg BNA.The leadership team will include Sue Martin, formerly CFO of the Bloomberg Industry Verticals; Darren McKewen, President of BNA; and Dmitri Mehlhorn.

Listening at AALL. McCaffery's letter acknowledged the impact of client discussions at the recent AALL conference.

"We discussed these topics repeatedly two weeks ago at the American Association of Law Libraries annual conference, when a team of us from Bloomberg Law/Bloomberg BNA spent four days with leaders in the field of legal information."

The "Why" of this Move

"Clients want even better solutions—solutions that integrate Bloomberg business insights, BNA content, and next-generation legal research technology to help our clients thrive in the changing landscape. "

Yes You Can Still Subscribe Directly to BNA Products The top question on the minds of information professionals will be whether this move suggests that the company is turning to a more aggressive marketing approach and requiring customers to purchase BLaw before they can get BNA subscriptions. There is no indication in the letter of any change is this regard.

Innovation Focused on Law Firm Profitability. Music to everyone's ears. "We are committed to making individual users more effective, and our clients' enterprises more profitable." The letter describes the integration of BBNA Tax Management Portfolios with the Bloomberg Law DealMaker product to give tax professionals even more powerful tools for serving their clients. I believe this is absolutely the future. We will see new "mash ups" of previously independent products which connects previously independent content sets while adding new functionality and the opportunity for greater productivity.

Content Powered By Context and Connections. This is the main legal publishing industry trend which has already been in motion. Recent moves by Thomson Reuters, Lexis, Nexis and Wolters Kluwer echo the same message. We are no longer buying content, we are buying content wired to unconventional data streams which will surface new connections and be powered to change the way we work.

Good News for BLaw Subscribers This morning Greg McCaffery put a stake in the ground and declared that Bloomberg BNA will beat the competition in speeding innovation to the marketplace. The good news for Bloomberg BNA subscribers is that whatever BBNA develops, they are assured that they will get it all. One of Bloomberg Law's distinguishing approaches to the legal market is to provide a predictable pricing model which assures that all innovations and new products are immediately available to all subscribers.

Pearson the British publisher of the Financial Times, announced that they will be selling their Mergermarket unit which publishes the Mergermarket deal monitoring and deal data product and Debtwire which covers the global distressed debt market.According to a story in the New York Times, Pearson bought Mergermarket for $192 Million in 2006. The Times story also reported that Mergermarket's sales were $334 million in the first half of 2013.

Mergermarket has gained traction in US law firms due to its "boots on the ground" approach to monitoring deal activities and rumors in 67 locations around the world. Reporters provide a steady stream of custom deal news as well as an excellent deal database which is used for Competitive Intelligence analysis and by lawyers for determining "What's Market." Since M&A activity has been uneven over the past few years, it is impressive that Mergermarkets revenue has grown in this tough environment.Over the past year there have been rumors that Pearson was in talks with Bloomberg regarding the sale of the Financial Times. Pearson’s announcement indicated that it did not intend to sell the Financial Times because it was viewed as important to their educational market strategy and apparently Mergermarket is not. But there is probably a legal publisher with a strategy which would benefit from a product like Mergermarket.

Where is the Most Strategic Synergy in Legal Publishing for Mergermarket?

Bloomberg Law doesn’t need it. They have much of the same data although they present it differently. I would only see Bloomberg buying Mergermarket so someone else can't benefit from owning it.

Thomson Reuters Like Bloomberg. TR doesn't really doesn’t need Mergermarket since they have the Thomson Reuters financial platform which is chocked full of deal data. TR is already working on integrating Thomson Reuters financial data into their legal products. Mergermarket also has some overlap with the "what's market" market capabilities of the newly acquired Practical Law Company platform which was purchased earlier this year.

LexisNexis has been in the habit of purchasing (Law 360 and Knowledge Mosaic) or aligning (American Lawyer Media) with specialty publishers which cater to the legal market. Knowledge Mosaic has a different emphasis than Mergermarket but covers some of the same deal data, so the acquisition of Mergermarket does not seem like a likely move for LexisNexis to me.

Wolters Kluwer Law and Business – Now this one is intriguing. Wolters Kluwer has recenly expanded and accelerated their suite of "push" offerings with their of daily legal newsletters. These newsletters focus on legal issues. Lawyers welcome products that can weave legal and business issues together in a way that enhances their competitiveness and efficiency. Wolters Kluwer already has a strong core of corporate, antitrust and securities legal content on their Intelliconnect and RBSource platforms. It's not hard to imagine some sparks flying if they married the stream of Mergermarket rumors and deals data to their core corporate legal content.

The Risk of Acquisition

Law librarians and legal information professionals know all too well that all product acquisitions do not end happily for customers or products. The litany of lost products is too long to recite, but as alawys we will watch carefully to see if Mergermarket can survive and thrive its own merger.

Also of Note -- A Recent Bloomberg - Above the Law Connection

Bloomberg Media recently recruited Justin B Smith who engineered a digital transformation of The Atlantic magazine. At the end of the story in the New York Times, it noted that Smith founded Breaking Media which owns a number of websites, most notably the Above the Law blog. I contacted David Lat the Managing Editor of ATL and he indicated that Smith's move to Bloomberg will have no impact on ATL. Fair enough, Smith has moved to Bloomberg Media and not to Bloomberg Law, but something could happen over a water cooler! Bloomberg Law is always on the prowl for good content and new media is hot. BLaw did establish an alliance with another leading legal blog ScotusBlog which covers the US Supreme Court. Just gotta keep wondering what's up next!

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Every PLL Summit has been a success but the 4th Annual PLL Summit, SOS: Shaping Our Success, which was held on July 13th in Seattle, set a new standard of excellence by all accounts. Due to a combination of jetlag and computer problems, I was unable to write my normal nocturnal dispaces. As my daughter likes to say, "God made midnight, so Mom could write."

So I will begin, a week late, to report on the panels, the personalities and the punditry. BloombergBNA hosted the opening reception Friday evening and provided an opportunity for attendees to meet the "celebrity" guest speakers, the sponsors and network with each other.

Jean O'Grady and Bruce MacEwen
(c. Bess Reynolds)

Growth is Dead Now What?
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The Summit,, kicked off with an extraordinary presentation by the lawyer, economist, consultant, Bruce MacEwen, aka Adam Smith Esq. He is a wizard with charts and data and kept everyone riveted with diagnostics, precautions and predictions for the future of law firms.

Lean Up! Finding and Seizing Opportunities for Growth"

Bruce MacEwen opened his presentation by stating that the recession had given law firms permission to talk about things that could never be discussed before. We continued discussing "the unspeakable" in the Lean Up Panel. I set the stage with data and trend analysis. Lawyer and consultant Victoria Pynchon, was both provocative and entertaining in asking us to "reframe" our careers. Bob Oaks and Bill Scarbrough provided insights into the opportunities they created or seized on their way to the C-Suite. Joan Axelroth moderated and provided questions to the panel.

Lunch With "Above the Law" or How did a Nice Harvard/Yale Grad Like You End Up Starting "Above the Law?"

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Victoria Pynchon and David Lat
(c. Bess Reynolds)

Picture this: David Lat, Assistant Attorney General in Newark meeting with his former boss New Jersey Governor Chris Christie when Christie was Attorney General, in the days after Lat "outed himself" as the author of a controversial blog. Convinced that his identity was about to be "uncovered," Lat agreed to be interviewed by Jeffery Toobin for an article in the New Yorker. Before there was "Above the Law" there was "Underneath Their Robes" judicial snark-fest written by David's female doppelganger "Article 3 Groupie." David provided a wonderful history of how he developed "Above the Law" and how it evolved from being every CMO's nightmare into being an almost mainstream communication channel which now receives advance copies of things like bonus memos from Big Law PR departments.

Afternoon Tracks. Branding, Social Media

The worst thing about tracks is having to choose between "hot topics." No matter which one's you pick you are always sure you missed something important and this time it would have been true.sessions

Thank you Fastcase, founders Ed Walters and Phil Rosenthal for taking the time to recognize the "unsung heroes" who are helping the legal profession navigate the stormy seas to the reinvented practice of law.

This is the first alignment of independent legal publishers that I can recall.. As a consumer of legal information, I appreciate the importance of small publishers in the legal information ecosphere. Past publishing partnerships involved companies of wildly disproportionate size and market power. This partnership has delightful symmetry and counterpoint (Hein offers deep archive of primary and secondary historical materials, Fastcase has a primary law research system which offers futuristic visualization tools, search algorithms and the "bad law bot." I applaud this partnership of two high quality niche publishers..

Ed Walters at New Fastcase HQ
c. Jean O'Grady

“Fastcase and HeinOnline are two of the largest independent legal publishers in America,” said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase. “Integrating these two libraries is a home run for our members. Both services create unique values based on citation analysis and the information architecture of the law. Beyond the fantastic new libraries our users can access, we’re also making our tools smarter as they learn from these new citation relationships.”

Customers Win Concurrently, Hein will provide HeinOnline materials to Fastcase, allowing Fastcase users to search across content available in the Law Journal Library, Session Laws Library, State Attorney General Reports and Opinions, and State Statutes: A Historical Archive. The new libraries will be fully integrated into Fastcase’s search system, and Fastcase users will see Hein results and abstracts for free, with subscription options for the full articles. The Hein collection will include more than 1,800 law reviews back to their first volumes, and represents the first secondary material to be integrated into the Fastcase legal research service.

New Topical Advance Sheets

Last year, Fastcase began releasing jurisdictional digital "advance sheets" which report judicial opinions as they are released.. They will now be publishing topical slices of newly released federal opinions in a new suite of advance sheets which are released as eBooks.

The thing I really like about the Fastcase advance sheets are the "skeuomorphic" features. You experience traditional book features including the shaded binding between two pages and have the natural experience of page turning.

New Digs Too

Fastcase is also in the process of moving to new digs in the Penn Quarter section of DC. . Welcome to the neighborhood!

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The July edition ofPractice Innovations from Thomson Reuters was just released and it
includes an interesting array of articles of interest to law firm executives in
a wide ranges of areas including, procurement, business development, process improvement, knowledge and library management,. Below you can link directly to articles of interest.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

When Bloomberg Law acquired BNA in September 2011, they promised to develop sophisticated practitioner pages. Today they are announcing the release of the The Securities Practice Center which integrates laws and regulations; opinions and dockets; SEC and SRO materials; books, treatises, Bloomberg BNA Law Reports and Portfolios, plus a broad range of transactional resources, including the DealMaker Document Search with over 300,000 real transaction documents. The "gold plated" Bloomberg Business company information, news and data which can drive custom alerts is also woven throughout the platform. It is clear that Bloomberg is also responding in part to Thomson Reuters acquisition of PLC and the LexisNexis development of Practice Advisor as well as the sophisitcated No Action Letter research offerings from Intelligize.

Bloomberg Law Securities Practice Center

All In For Subscribers Maintaining their "no exclusions" policy, the Securities Law Practice Center will be available to all Bloomberg Law subscribers at no additional cost.

Something New in EDGAR filings, No Kidding! I have to be honest, every time someone offers new EDGAR content I groan at the thought of yet one more option in an over saturated market. But Bloomberg Law had done something interesting!

Bloomberg Law's new EDGAR functionality includes market-based search filters, related document stock charts and side-by-side and redlined views of results produced in Item and Risk Factor searches, with the option to compare your own text with other filings.

﻿﻿﻿﻿This means you can read an EDGAR filing and look at what the stock was doing before during and after disclosed events! I have worked with enough Securities Litigators to know that what used to be a complex research project can now be handled with one click! I can't think of any competitor offering this kind of contextual data integration.
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EDGAR filing with related stock price data

Partners Using BLaw for Business Development

Is is also notable in the press release reprinted below includes a quote from a partner regarding how he uses Blaw for Business Development:

"My need for research information comes at two major points in time—when I am reaching out to new clients and when I am addressing the often complex securities issues they face," said Nicolas Morgan, DLA Piper Partner and West Coast Chair of the firm's Securities Enforcement Practice. "Bloomberg Law's smart, practical format allows me to find the securities information I need quickly and the alerts function helps me stay ahead of potential problems."

Enhanced EDGAR Search. Bloomberg Law's new EDGAR functionality includes market-based search filters, related document stock charts and side-by-side and redlined views of results produced in Item and Risk Factor searches, with the option to compare your own text with other filings.

Fielded No-Action Letter Search. Bloomberg Law’s new specialized No-Action Letter Search includes multiple fields that enable you to narrow your search, allowing for fast, efficient research of SEC guidance and interpretation and helping to ensure that relevant letters are at your fingertips.

"Go-To" Citation Search. Next-generation navigation provides quick access to securities laws and regulations, including major Acts, the Code of Federal Regulations, and SEC and CFTC materials–all in one place.

Critical
Content Into Their Workflow and Stay on Top of the Latest Developments

New York - Bloomberg Law, the legal and business
intelligence research system from the world leader in data and information
services, today launched a series of enhancements to its Securities Practice
Center designed to provide practitioners with the next generation of tools,
resources and analysis to best serve their clients.

The Securities Practice Center seamlessly integrates laws
and regulations; opinions and dockets; SEC and SRO materials; books, treatises,
Bloomberg BNA Law Reports and Portfolios; and much more. A broad range of
transactional resources, including the DealMaker Document Search with over
300,000 real transaction documents, and the renowned Bloomberg company
information and news, provide users with superior value. All Bloomberg Law
users have access to the enhanced Securities Law Practice Center as part of their
subscription.

"Bloomberg Law's Practice Centers integrate primary
and secondary sources with advanced practice tools to provide a comprehensive
resource unique to a particular practice area and the Securities Practice
Center has long been a cornerstone," said Joe Breda, Bloomberg Law’s head
of product. “We listened carefully to our clients as we built on that strength
to add a new level of content, analysis and tools oriented around the way
practitioners work."

"My need for research information comes at two major
points in time—when I am reaching out to new clients and when I am addressing
the often complex securities issues they face," said Nicolas Morgan, DLA
Piper Partner and West Coast Chair of the firm's Securities Enforcement
Practice. "Bloomberg Law's smart, practical format allows me to find the
securities information I need quickly and the alerts function helps me stay
ahead of potential problems."

The Securities Practice Center allows users to take
advantage of integrated resources across Bloomberg Law's award-winning legal
research platform, including powerful new features:

·Enhanced EDGAR Search. Bloomberg
Law's new EDGAR functionality includes market-based search filters, related
document stock charts and side-by-side and redlined views of results produced
in Item and Risk Factor searches, with the option to compare your own text with
other filings.

·Fielded No-Action Letter Search.
Bloomberg Law’s new specialized No-Action Letter Search includes multiple
fields that enable you to narrow your search, allowing for fast, efficient
research of SEC guidance and interpretation and helping to ensure that relevant
letters are at your fingertips.

·"Go-To" Citation Search.
Next-generation navigation provides quick access to securities laws and regulations,
including major Acts, the Code of Federal Regulations, and SEC and CFTC
materials–all in one place.

In addition, Bloomberg Law's Securities Practice Center
makes it easy to search securities opinions and dockets, stay on top of the
latest industry developments and provide clients with optimal solutions.
All users have unlimited access to EDGAR Search, the SEC No-Action Letter
Search, example transactional documents and clauses, Bloomberg Law's deep
library of regulatory materials and analysis, Bloomberg's acclaimed securities
news coverage and company information, and trusted secondary sources, including
Bloomberg BNA’s Alternative Investment Law Report® and White Collar
Crime Report™, and an extensive selection of Practising Law Institute securities
law treatises.

Bloomberg Law developed its Practice Centers based
on practitioners’ feedback of what is most important to their areas of
specialty. Each Practice Center integrates
in-depth legal analysis, commentary and news with time-saving tools and key
primary sources to help give attorneys a comprehensive, nuanced understanding
of the issues unique to their particular practice areas. In addition to
Securities, Bloomberg Law Practice Centers include Tax, Antitrust, Banking
& Finance, Employee Benefits, Intellectual Property, Bankruptcy,
Corporate/M&A, Health, and Labor & Employment.

About Bloomberg Law

Bloomberg Law is a legal and business intelligence, news and research
system designed for leading legal professionals who are focused on delivering
superior client service. By integrating Bloomberg’s renowned news, company and
financial data with primary and secondary legal research and business
development tools, Bloomberg Law delivers an advantage to legal professionals
who handle the most complex legal matters. Presented in a sophisticated yet
easy-to-use interface, Bloomberg Law allows subscribers unlimited desktop and
mobile access to the information in the system–as often as they want and
whenever they want. For more information, visit BloombergLaw.com.

About Bloomberg

Bloomberg, the global business
and financial information and news leader, gives influential decision makers a
critical edge by connecting them to a dynamic network of information, people
and ideas. The company’s strength–delivering data, news and analytics through
innovative technology, quickly and accurately–is at the core of the Bloomberg
Professional service, which provides real time financial information to more
than 315,000 subscribers globally. Headquartered in New York, Bloomberg employs
more than 15,000 people in 192 locations around the world.

Friday, July 5, 2013

American Lawyer Media Legal Intelligence released the 2013 Law Librarian Survey data earlier this week.

Library Chiefs Rule Contract Negotiations

Firms recognize the special expertise of Library Directors in high ticket and complex licencing negotiations. 87% of the firms have kept this responsibility in the hands of the Library Director.

In reviewing the data I am struck by the terrific challenge library chiefs face in the current environment. Law firm profits are reviving, lawyers continue to demand the best and most strategic information resources for their practices and yet library chiefs have succeeded in containing costs. The survey give clues how they achieve this. Librarians are sharp negotiators who assess not only price but the comparative value and usability of the content. They also employ sophisticated tools for analysing the ROI for the resources they invest in. These talents are paying off big time for the firms which employ these experts.

The Big Movers: Embedding, Complex Research Competitive Intelligence and Social Media Monitoring

A few trends showed dramatic changes from the prior year or made a strong first appearance in the survey

72% of are embedding librarian in practice groups up from 14% in 2012.

75% report that librarians are performing legal research previously performed by lawyers up 16% from 59% in 2012.

Manzama a social media monitoring tool jumped to the top of the news aggregation tools and is used in 40% of the responding firms.

A Sampling of Key Trends From the 2013 Law Library Survey

58% of Library Chiefs are responsible for overseeing Competitive Intelligences

43 % of Library Chiefs are responsible for Knowledge management

The average budget was down $500,000

Fewer firms were purchasing eBooks. Number dropped from 24% to 21% of libraries.

Librarians: AFA/Insourcing Trend in Practice Support

Firms appear to be recognizing the value and expertise of research staff in delivering lower cost/ high value results to clients. Librarians are increasingly their volume of legal research formerly handled by lawyers. 75% of respondents report that librarians are performing complex legal research. This could be the result of librarians having the expertise in specialized research platforms or a general decline in lawyers research skills. There was a decline in the value of work billed by clients which might also suggest that lawyers are shifting AFA work the research staff.

Outsourcing and Centralization

For several years Library Chiefs has been spearheading initiatives to streamline library operations through centralization and outsourcing administrative operations. I am uncomfortable with the results reported regarding centralization and outsourcing. The ALM data actually suggests both centralization and outsourcing are declining. Centralization was down in in all categories except Contract negotiations. This doesn't seem likely. When I asked ALM to validate the data they responded that the wording of the question had changed in the past year. But they have not yet provided me with the wording of the 2012 question.

Low Cost Centers: The Trend That Was Not Tracked

An issue related to outsourcing was not even on the survey. The newer trend of migrating work to lower cost centers was not addressed in the survey. In the past year several ALM 100 firms began moving some work to low cost centers and this is a trend that should be measured in future reports. In one case the entire library was relocated, in most instances, selected functions were moved to the low cost center.

Research Support
A new question asked how much time the staff spending on research to support clients or business development (69%). 59% of respondents report the centralization of research. It is not clear how many are referring to a centralized staffing location or alternatively to a virtual centralization which creates a unified workflow across multiple locations. But one obvious benefit of centralized virtual research is expanding the hours of coverage by taking advantage of time zone differences.

The Long Slow Death of Cost Recovery

In just 4 year there has been a dramatic decline in the number of firms which recover more than 60% of their online costs. In 2009 51% of firms reported recovering more than 60% of their online costs. In 2013 it is down a whopping firm22% to 29% of responding firms. This is no doubt due in part to the growth of AFAs and client demands for cost reduction.

Recommendations

Since this survey covers the Amlaw 200, I recommend that ALM add questions on cost per attorney and staffing of services per attorney. This would provide valuable metrics for benchmarking.

Query dollar amount of print spending. Yes it will be a kind of deathwatch.

Query the amount spent for new specialized digital products

Ask for the name of one new speciality resource which was acquired and why it was purchased.

Add question on low cost centers

There is a lot more detail and many other issues addressed in the full report. I look forward to the ALM Survey presentation at the upcoming AALL Annual conference in Seattle.

*Hat tip to Melville Dewey, 19th century efficiency reformer, founder of the first School of Library Economy, and inventor of the eponymous decimal classification system based on Sir Francis Bacon's outline of human knowledge.